Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (41 page)

“I always had a thing for stuffed animals.” Steve Gay, age five, with his growing collection. Courtesy of Steve Gay.

I’ve always wanted to farm, but not driving tractors or milking cows. I enjoyed working with livestock, and I really liked hogs. When I graduated from college in 1981, I came back home to the farm because my dad had a good opportunity for me to get started. For me, hogs are a pleasure to work with, at least for another fifteen or twenty years. Jim works for me and has to take orders from me when we’re working outside. We’re together twenty-four hours a day, which is very stressful at times. Sometimes we want to wring each other’s necks, but it’s nice, too, because we’re on
the same schedule so when we have time off we can go and do things together.

It seems like a lot of our gay friends put Jim and me up on a pedestal. They think so much of us and of the fact that we’re on the farm and that we’ve been in this relationship for so many years. We don’t feel like we’re anything special, because we know everything we’ve had to go through to get here. Through a lot of hard work and dedication, this is what we have. Fifteen, twenty years ago, I would never have imagined that I would be as happy with my life as I am now, and that I could be the way I am. We can be something society says we can’t; we can act like we’re married and have a total life together. When a farm feed company holds a meeting, the invitation is usually addressed to the producer and his wife. Most of the time, my invitation is addressed to Steve Gay and Jim. They probably have an awareness that we’re gay, but it’s never talked about and I never make a big deal out of it. I just kind of let things go as they go, and people can think what they want. As open as we are about it, I don’t know how many people really know.

Our gay friends think it’s just wild that we’re pig farmers. There are probably more gay farmers than we realize, but most of them aren’t open about it like I am. I guess it’s just the strong-willed part of me that some people have and some don’t. You’ve got to say, hey, my life is going to be what
I
want, it’s going to make
me
happy. If other people don’t want to contribute to that, well, then they won’t. If they can’t handle it, that’s too bad. It takes a lot of will and self-determination to go against your family and friends—to make people see you differently than they used to. It takes some gay people a long time to build up to that. They have to feel so much torment and depression to make them finally do it. And some people just can’t do it. Instead they’ll torment themselves for the rest of their lives, for the sake of all those other people.

Rick was born in 1960 and grew up with two younger brothers in north-central Iowa, near Sheffield, in Cerro Gordo County. The farm was about 450 acres when Rick was born, and it grew to about 800 acres. It was mainly a grain farm
—
corn, soybeans, and oats—and a hog operation. Rick lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where he works for a bank.

EVENTUALLY, I would like to live on about five acres outside of town, so I could have a couple of large dogs and maybe even a few farm animals. Farming doesn’t interest me, but life on a farm does. I like the openness and solitude, but I would have to be in driving distance of an active gay lifestyle.

I wouldn’t give up growing up on a farm for anything. Farmers are there to create. Their whole life is built on growing and maturing and harvesting. I value life a lot, and there are a lot of people who don’t. Another thing is pride. Driving through farming neighborhoods, you can tell who takes pride in their farms and who doesn’t. It doesn’t take much to let the buildings get run down, or for weeds to grow up around the buildings, or for corn to grow up in the beans. My dad built his farm up on his own to where it is today, and his fields were always clean. Every summer, as a family, we walked all our beans and pulled out all the weeds and volunteer corn. I would feel not only that I was letting myself down, but my parents as well, if I did a bad job at my work or whatever I did. I’m closer to my dad now than I’ve ever been, and I’ve never admired a person more for the work they’ve done. A farmer has to do everything—be a veterinarian, a businessman, a laborer, a bookkeeper. Dad never went to college, just graduated from high school and started out on his own.

We raised about a thousand hogs a year, but Dad never really pushed us to become involved in the day-to-day farming operations. We’d help with special projects, like vaccinating pigs or sorting pigs to take them to market. If Dad asked us to do something, we’d do it, but he was very much of a perfectionist and preferred to do things on his own. I always felt kind of out of place, like I could never live up to the expectations he would set for me. But with each kid, Dad mellowed out a little bit, so each one down
the road got a little more involved. When he was younger he could handle it all himself, but as the farm grew and he needed more help he would take more time to explain things clearly and show how it needed to be done.

I liked working with the livestock, especially my own projects. My brothers and I would raise our own calves or pigs, and I would get into awful arguments with my dad over how he treated the pigs. Once one pig bites another pig’s tail and gets the taste of blood, it will eat and eat until it kills the pig, or chews the tails off all of them. It can get to be an epidemic. Dad would just take a metal bar and knock the pig’s teeth out so it couldn’t do that anymore. I would scream at him. I thought that was the most cruel and awful thing. That was probably the one time I felt like he thought I was a wuss.

I’m not a mechanical person, and I found the fieldwork really monotonous—going up and down the rows and never seeming to get to the end of it. When I was cultivating I would get caught up in my own thoughts, start to daydream, and wipe out rows of corn. We had an old Allis Chalmers tractor that I hadn’t driven all that often. When I was ten or eleven, I was taking a load of bales over to my grandparents’ place, and I forgot I had to hit the clutch before the brake. I was pounding on the brake but the tractor wasn’t stopping, and I ran the tractor into a telephone pole. Dad yelled at me, and I thought, oh my god, I’ve failed! He always gave me the opportunity, but I never wanted to go out and do anything after that. I never felt like he put me down, but I was always kind of in awe of what he did, and I put a lot of pressure on myself.

Mom was a lot more jovial and outgoing than Dad, more the friend in the family. She was the one who really got us interested in sports. Her whole family was very athletic; two of my uncles played minor league professional baseball. When Dad was out working on the farm, Mom would be hitting us fly balls in the yard. Growing up in a small town, we had the opportunity to participate in about anything we wanted to. In high school, I was in baseball, basketball, track, speech, band, choir, Future Farmers of America. I had the most success early on in speech. I got the top ratings in original oratory.

In FFA my freshman year, one of the competitions was to memorize the FFA creed and present it. I didn’t want to do it, but they talked me into it because I was in speech. By the day I was to go to the contest, I had managed to memorize it, but that was about it. I didn’t know where I wanted to put the most emphasis, where to pause. With my other speech work I would rehearse and nit-pick and edit. I knew I wouldn’t do the best job I could, so I didn’t want to do it. I told my mom to call my FFA
coach and tell him I was not going. She said, “If you want to do that to your teacher and your team, then
you
have to do it.” I called and used the “I’m sick” excuse, and I was embarrassed for a week or two.
¹

By the beginning of my junior year in high school, I was six feet tall and my success in athletics kind of took off. In basketball, I was the captain of our team my senior year. In track, I always ran the mile and had just mediocre times, but in my senior year I developed some speed. I ran hurdles and tied for the best time in the state in our class. When we had districts at our school, I thought I was a shoo-in to make it to state, but I hit the last hurdle and fell. I was devastated, but my track coach picked me up, put his arm around me, and said, “You’re still one of the best hurdlers we’ve had. Now I need you to run in a relay for us.” I thought, god, give me a break, I’m grieving here! But I ran that relay and we placed in it.

Sheffield and Rockwell were archrivals in everything. Sheffield didn’t have a Catholic church, so I would go to catechism classes in Rockwell on Wednesday nights with my friends from Sheffield. By sixth grade, all my friends were dropping out, so I was the only Sheffield kid there, with fourteen or fifteen Rockwell kids. I was starting to get picked on. Whenever we had to memorize a prayer, the Rockwell kids would never have it memorized. I would, but I would tell the teacher I didn’t, and when I would read out loud I would pretend like I didn’t know a word, just so I wouldn’t stick out and give them anything else to pick on me about. It got pretty bad for a while; I was so uptight, I was checked for stomach ulcers. One time, on the way to catechism class, I jumped out of the car when we stopped at a stop sign, and was going to walk the eight miles back home. Finally, during the class, I raised my hand and asked the instructor if I could go to the restroom. I left the church building, went to the local grain elevator, and called my grandpa to come get me. He took me home and I never went back.

My mom was raised Methodist, but Dad wanted his kids to be Catholic. He and I are both very stubborn, and we would butt heads on a lot of issues. My last year in high school, we were having one of our go-rounds. I had decided I was not going to go to the Catholic church and Dad said I was. One thing led to another, and I decided to leave home for a while, so I stayed with a friend in town for a few days. Dad and I finally reached a compromise where I would go to the Catholic church two times a month and to the church of my choice two times a month. If it was a five-Sunday month, I’d go to the Catholic church the fifth one.

I checked out quite a few churches that I could get to—Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist. I’m glad Dad and Mom gave me the opportunity
to explore those other churches, because if they hadn’t I might have just chucked the Catholic church altogether. As time went on, I realized that even though I had some fundamental differences with the Catholic church, my major beliefs were still more Catholic. I haven’t gone to services in quite a while, but I still consider myself a religious person. I still say prayers before I go to bed at night. I’m not sure I would classify myself as a strong believer in organized religion, but my belief is there, as far as a supreme being or whatever.

In Cub Scouts, all the other guys would be drooling and slobbering over the girls in
Playboy
and
Penthouse
, but it wasn’t really doing the job for me. But it really turned me on when they’d have pictures of a man and woman having sex. I always thought it was just the act of sex, but now I think it was because there was a man in the picture. On one Webelos expedition we were playing “Truth or Dare,” and one guy pulled down his pants and said, “Truth or dare.” I said, “Dare,” and he said, “Lick my penis.” I said I wasn’t going to do it, and they said I had to. They forced my head down, but they didn’t make me do it. I remember thinking that night that I should’ve tried it. In fifth or sixth grade, I’d have friends stay overnight and we would sometimes wrestle around and touch each other, but we never really experimented with each other. When I was a freshman, I was in the same locker room as some of the seniors, and I was intrigued by the guys who had hairy chests, or more hair anywhere on their bodies.

I always had a date for the prom and things like that, and I enjoyed holding hands and kissing with a girl, but I never tried anything farther than that. I was very naive, as far as sex, and I sensed a differentness in myself. I masturbated a lot—often with
Penthouse
magazine, reading “The Forum”—and I would think about some of the guys in the locker room. I knew my friends masturbated, but I didn’t know if they were thinking the same thoughts. It bothered me, feeling like I was different but not really knowing how or why.

I didn’t date much in college. I felt that I was really ugly, and that no one would want to date me. In the dorm room next to me were two very attractive guys, John and Andy, who were supposedly gay. I knew the words, like gay and faggot, and I knew they liked other guys, but I didn’t really grasp what that was about. They had a friend who was also supposedly gay but who was not attractive to me. I had a party in my room and they were all invited. I got really drunk, and this other guy supposedly took care of me and put me to bed. I took a lot of razzing from everyone about that. Later on, he and I had a drink together, and I’m sure he was hitting on me. It excited me but at the same time it repulsed me. I never spoke to him again.

After college, I started teaching school and lived with two other single male teachers. I saw the movie,
Making Love,
advertised and wanted to see it so bad, but I did not want them to know.
²
We only had one television, so I watched it at 3:30 in the morning. I was in the living room with the lights turned off, really quiet, leaned over, listening to the TV I just sobbed at the end of it. That was my first inkling why I was different. After that I knew I was attracted to men, but I didn’t know I could really do anything about it. Where would I look? I didn’t know there were gay bars and gay athletics. And I’d never had sex with a woman, so I certainly wasn’t going to try to have sex with a man. I just thought I hadn’t found the right woman yet. But I would often think back to John and Andy and that other guy in college, and wish I had pursued something further, or at least found out what that gay thing was about.